Early American Cartographies

INTRODUCTION

THE PLURALITY OF EARLY AMERICAN CARTOGRAPHY

Martin Brückner

Two atlas maps showing the Western Hemisphere—Americae Sive Novi Orbis, Nova Descriptio (1587) by Abraham Ortelius and the map America (1823) by Henry S. Tanner—illustrate the story that is most frequently told about three centuries of early American cartography (Figures 1 and 2). The Ortelius map, designed at the peak of sixteenth-century reconnaissance expeditions and travel reports and after the introduction of the Mercator projection, permanently changed formerly speculative depictions of the New World. Published in an atlas entitled Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the map was indicative of the general adoption of cartography as the graphic container of geographical information. Placed inside a world atlas, it documented the rise of America from an initially mapless to a map-dominated representation. Indeed, beginning with maps such as Americae Sive Novi Orbis discussions about America—be they political, economic, or academic—became subsequently carto-coded; from public documents to personal writings, references to specific map titles, coordinates, and the uniquely sculpted visual form of the American continent would from here forward reflect and shape the idea of America as a place, space, or environment.

If we fast-forward to the Tanner map, the story of early American cartography changes less in form but more in matters of function. Published in a Philadelphia edition of a popular atlas, the continental map of the Americas now reflected two and a half centuries of knowledge production and transfer. On the one hand, the once malleable image of America had become stabilized as more accurate geodetic data had replaced formerly fuzzy information while filling in the details of previously unmapped blank spaces. On the other hand, being the latest product of a burgeoning print market, geographic mobility, and popular education, Tanner’s large-scale map hailed the presence of an array of similar maps, including hundreds of much smaller-scaled views charting American localities. Serving as the implied gateway to a vast cartographic

FIGURE 1. Americae Sive Novi Orbis, Nova Descriptio (1587). From Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1592). Courtesy, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

FIGURE 2. America (1823). From Henry S. Tanner, A New American Atlas Containing Maps of the Several States of the North American Union . . . (Philadelphia, 1823). Courtesy, The Library Company of Philadelphia

archive, this map demonstrated early American cartography’s development into a highly diversified commodity that was intended to reach a broad carto-literate readership on both sides of the Atlantic.¹

When read together, maps like those by Ortelius and Tanner provide the bookends for stories that celebrate progress and knowledge, technology and transparency. Rich and comprehensive as these stories are, they are based on narrow definitions describing the cartographic culture in the early Americas. Academic and popular writings consistently understood the term cartography as a marvel of European science whose protocols and products not only dominate the representation of space but seem to do so with a singular technological and discursive edge. Traditional cartographic histories emphasize with great regularity that, just as cartography emerged from a combination of craft and print culture, the printed map’s graphic properties—the grid lines and topographic symbols—also rendered maps made in the European vein not only useful but irresistible to all people living in the Americas.²

Using dates that frequently bracket several centuries or shorthand terms such as early, these writings locate the story of early American maps and the cartographic culture surrounding them inside a rigorously periodized framework that, structured by a progressive idea of history, invariably tied descriptions of map design (maps showing America) and production (maps made in America) to a Eurocentric conception of cartographic beginnings. According to most studies, these beginnings were multiple; they happened in fits and starts, ranging from sixteenth-century map inscriptions to eighteenthcentury mapping initiatives; and, above all, they invoked value judgments that persistently decried the poor quality of American-made maps while celebrating those of European origins. Last but not least, stories about early modern cartography, while endlessly fascinated with American maps, tend to gloss over or abbreviate the highly varied history of maps and mapping practices as they played out in specifically American settings. For the most part, the term American is used adjectivally, serving as a geographic referent to better differentiate a map’s content, but not to address a map in its local context and explain its relevance from an American perspective. If addressed at all, cartographic culture in the early Americas was either a footnote to European histories of mapmaking or a brief excerpt foreshadowing the rise of Anglo-American and Ibero-American nation-states.³ The terms cartography, early, and American signal a rather prescriptive understanding of cartographic history, the very concept of maps, and the study of cartographic representation and practice in the Americas.

Yet, hiding behind these stories is a varied and complicated history of cartographic theories and practices that was concentrated in Europe but also that spanned the Atlantic and informed a more broadly defined cartographic culture in the Americas. Traditional stories about early American cartography consistently overlook that the very term cartography was a neologism coined by a member of the incipient British Geographical Society in 1859 and thus gained currency long after the period marked as early and after the term America had acquired certain modern meanings unavailable in previous centuries. In its singular definition, the term cartography signaled the advent of the standardization of maps and the professionalization of the mapping industry (which was further reified by the appearance of the term cartographer in 1863). But, by adopting this neologism, mapmakers and map users glossed over the enduring presence of alternative notions of cartography. On the one hand, the term cartography suddenly contained and streamlined the presence of more than fifty map definitions that circulated in England before 1850, including denotations ranging from picture and portraiture to landscape and view (and that also served to bury the semantic ambiguity surrounding the label of mapmakers who used sobriquets such as geographer, plat-maker, draughtsman, or map-publisher). On the other hand, the advent of the term cartography propagated a Eurocentric idea of maps and mapping practices and thus failed to take into account the vast array of European and non-European maps and mapping practices used in the Americas (and around the globe), many of which operated outside official cartographic conventions, using neither latitude and longitude nor symbols or letter codes.⁴

This omission begs questions about how a monothetic definition of cartography came to dominate the description and interpretation of cartographic archives that existed in America before 1859. But, more significantly, and for the purposes of this book, it raises questions that address the plurality rather than the singularity underpinning cartographic definitions, artifacts, and practices. For example, what are the historical differences, formal similarities, and informal uses that were shaping maps informed by European and indigenous modes of cartographic representation? How did three centuries of contact, conquest, and collaboration in the Americas affect maps and map uses in local society? How did American maps that simultaneously hinged on local technologies and were globally intertwined shape attitudes toward spatial conceptions of the communal and the personal? Indeed, once we allow ourselves to imagine a cartographic history that is anchored in the Americas rather than in Europe, what did an America-centric, or intra-American, cartographic culture look like and how did it operate in a time and space yet unaffected by the fixation of cartography in name and protocol to the demands of European and emerging American institutions?

This collection of essays responds to these questions by adopting a more pluralistic and inclusive perspective in order to recover the polythetic nature of cartographic culture in the Americas as it existed before the nineteenth century. Such a perspective provides a historically more representative framework for the description and interpretation of maps that not only originated at the same time on both sides of the Atlantic but also that traveled simultaneously in vastly different cultural circles from the Americas to the European and the Pacific worlds. Inspired by the multiple connotations that revolved around maps and mapmaking, Early American Cartographies thus addresses maps from a broad range of disciplines (history, cartography, geography, art history, material culture, literature). As the various essays treat maps as a graphic, verbal, and performative form of communication, they collectively explore and document the conceptual, cultural, and material pluralism that informed maps and mapping practices in early America itself. By emphasizing cultural production rather than historical genealogy, the essays on the whole approach maps as polyvalent genetic texts that contain at once trans-cultural and local stories. By conceiving maps in terms of stories rather than as articles of fact, the essays retrace some of the familiar ways in which European, Euro-American, and Amerindian perspectives affected the production of maps and map knowledge. At the same time, the essays trace new paths of inquiry to better show, for example, the recently diversified early American canon of maps or the uneven patterns with which early American cartographies traveled in and out of American communication networks and knowledge systems, simultaneously fettered and unfettered by colonial, imperial, and national mapping projects. Pursuing, then, a hemispheric, multicultural, and international study of the early American cartographic archive, the essays illustrate that the florescence of cartographic knowledge about America was inextricably linked to a richly varied cartographic culture in the Americas.

CARTOGRAPHY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY: THE ONE MAP MODEL

With the goal to broaden the scope of critical inquiry and methodology, the essays in Early American Cartographies are informed by two powerful and persuasive strands of historiography that are the central building blocks responsible for the predominantly monothetic interpretation of American cartographic culture. In the first tradition, historical accounts valued maps showing the early Americas as a graphic supplement that provided authentic period views of geographical settings hosting historical events such as decisive battles, momentous journeys, or negotiated boundaries. By contrast, in the second tradition, early American maps advanced from being passive textual supplements to becoming central texts whose geometrized graphic designs actively shaped at once historical events in the past as well as critical attitudes toward the Americas as a historical place and environment in the present. Both historiographies offer useful methodologies and frameworks for interpreting the history and influence of maps in early America. But, as the following overview will show—and so will the various essays in this collection—indispensable and useful as both frameworks have been to inquiries into historical cartography they are based on nineteenth-century definitions of cartography that effectively prevented us from realizing the polythetic nature of early American cartographies.

The first historiographic tradition begins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when an increasingly standardized cartography was primarily considered as the handmaiden to either the academic history of geography or the more exciting (because deemed heroic) history of discovery and exploration.⁵ This tradition has its roots in academic and popular writings, which, after declaring geography to be the eye and key of history, went on to define maps as a geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the longitude and latitude.⁶ Following these definitions, historians treated old maps showing the Americas as decorative textual supplements, depicting certain American spaces, on the one hand, and historical events, on the other, in a graphic form that also reviewed the status of geographic knowledge during a certain historical period. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world of publishing—and the following examples from the United States have their match in Mexico as well as in Brazil—popular storytellers and nonacademic map users, such as journalists and novelists, commonly called upon historical maps with their conventional show of water, land, and settlements because they were best equipped for illustrating (or imagining) historical events as they had once unfolded in time and space. With the advent of historical studies in secondary schools and universities, this approach became more formalized; historical maps appeared as facsimiles in historical atlases, encouraging readers not only to read about but to actively chart the journeys of Christopher Columbus and Captain James Cook or the battles of Generals James Wolfe and George Washington.⁷

After geographers and mapmakers embraced the monothetical definition of cartography, the emerging disciplines of the natural sciences and the humanities at once preserved and popularized the supplemental function of early American maps when both the antiquarian and academic interest shifted toward comparative and thematic studies. Focusing on empiricism and scientific data mining about climate zones, population density, or the American frontier, progress-driven historical accounts used early maps as the narrative backdrop for establishing evolutionary tales (the before-and-after effect) in highly sensitive areas of politics, economics, disease control, and social planning.⁸ Roughly at the same time that cartography emerged in the academic dictionaries, natural historians (Louis Agassiz), historians (Francis Parkman), cultural critics (Alexis de Tocqueville), novelists (James Fenimore Cooper), and artists (John James Audubon) commonly applied map inserts or cartographic data when seeking to outline a people’s knowledge of place, their sense of historical consciousness, and even their most heartfelt desires.⁹ Indeed, similar to the way in which E. M. W. Tillyard could present the medieval notion of an orderly chain of being when illustrating the worldview of Renaissance England, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century studies across a broad range of disciplines treated early American maps as anatomies of an American worldview.¹⁰

By comparison, in the second historiography postmodern critiques of cartography revised this older, auxiliary understanding that cartography mirrored social life and societal structures, declaring it to be less a supplemental by-product and more a foundational ideology of Western civilization. During the final decades of the twentieth century, many critical assumptions about modernity took a spatial turn that emphasized the systemic impact of geometrical representation and territoriality, influencing everything from social constructions to the phenomenological experience of lifeworlds. According to scholars across the disciplinary spectrum—including Henri Lefebvre (sociology), Michel DeCerteau (philosophy), Immanuel Wallerstein (history), Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens (political science), Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Denis Cosgrove (geography), among others—maps ceased to be viewed as spatial depictions of historical events or mentalities. Instead, as the map’s unique geometric organization (the geodetic grid or graticule) increasingly determined human interactions with space, the pervasive application of geometry was now considered responsible for the gradual alignment of maps with all modes of social production.¹¹

In this second historiography, to follow Lefebvre’s influential work, The Production of Space (1991), geometrically configured maps emerged in Europe as a common spatial code for organizing everything from high culture to everyday life between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. At the same time, conquest and colonization turned this European mapping practice into a global phenomenon for imagining geographical and cultural spaces. The producers of these spaces were itinerant land surveyors, sedentary map engravers, and a host of spatial architects, including landscape designers and urban planners. Their cartographic products were easy to recognize both locally and globally because the geometrical organization of cartography created a fundamentally isotropic, one-size-fits-all graphic model that subsumed and transformed all other conceptions of space. Indeed, with the widespread adoption of a geometric mode of cartographic representation—involving coordinates, grid lines, and a global calculus for reckoning locations and finding places—early modern maps, including early American maps, were recognized not only as abstract but also as easy-to-manipulate paper constructs. As long as it was framed by geometry, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, early American cartography was "no bigger than an atlas the plates of which may be flattened, combined, reshuffled, superimposed, redrawn at will. American maps stand and fall not only according to a hegemonic mode of geometric representation but at the bidding of a political will motivated by interest and desire. By the same token that the cartographer dominates the world" in this second historiography, maps emerged as agents of domination and have thus been singled out in more recent histories and theories involving early American maps as the effective accomplice in the creation and maintenance of state power and social control.¹²

As this overview shows, each historiography provides constructive platforms for examining maps in early modern culture. The first and residual one, emerging from the progressive rhetoric of European national histories, rediscovers and popularizes conventional maps as a viable graphic context for illustrating narratives and social analysis. More than a century later, the second and emergent historiography, informed by the proposition that conventional maps are actually extraordinary texts, calls attention to the pervasiveness with which Western maps, in particular, and their geometrical design informed many aspects of cultural life. Together, both historiographies provide a tectonic view of cartography according to which early American maps function as record, as actual event, or as perceived consciousness, and thus are integral to the structure of historical discourse. But, in their instrumentalist view of maps and all things related to maps, both historiographies end up reifying the monothetic definition of cartography. Both cleave to Eurocentric conceptions of space and spatial representation (the older one on purpose, the more recent one on principle). And both thus pursue questions about cartographic representation and its attending culture from a particular ideological vantage point (be it scientific progress or political power) that, although essential to the study of maps, effectively blocks other non-European ideologies from registering alternative avenues for examining early American cartographies.

IDEOLOGY AND CLASSIC EARLY AMERICAN CARTOGRAPHY

What prevented both historiographies from conceiving American cartographic representations in more polythetic terms is the widespread adoption of an inescapably Eurocentric political ideology according to which maps express the authenticity and legitimacy of a particular American spatial history. This map-induced spatial history included everything from large-scale continental maps, such as Alberto Cantino’s world map of 1502 that divided South America into Spanish and Portuguese imperial territories, to small-scale property maps—the surveyor’s plats—which beginning with the 1670s transformed North America’s northeastern and mid-Atlantic countryside into private commodified legal tender. But, in stories commonly told about maps circulating in the early Americas, perhaps the most pertinent spatial history revolved around statecraft and the process by which cartographic names and graphic forms invented American polities as a pre-determined and permanent reality. One prominent case of such storytelling occurred in the aftermath of the ceremonial unveiling of the first map to show the name America—Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia (1507)—at the Library of Congress in 2003, when maps dating to the Columbian decades were compared to national birth certificates.¹³

That the very map that according to Edmundo O’Gorman is responsible for the invention of America should foreshadow the existence of American nation-states—here the United States—is a stretch of the historical imagination. But it is not a historical gaffe; it deeply resonates with both traditional and more recent accounts of early American cartography. Surveys of cartographic history, from Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg’s Mapping of America (1980) to John Rennie Short’s Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600–1900 (2001), viewed early American maps through a retrospective lens that inadvertently correlated their stories to a national cartography.¹⁴ The assumption that all maps lead to the nation-state is compelling, but only if the historical focus rests squarely on the period of American nation building between the 1780s and 1850s—and here we can invoke parallels that stretch from the United States to Brazil and from Mexico to Chile. Recent work on postcolonial states has documented the reciprocal relationship between cartography and the cultural practices involved in establishing national political cultures and sovereign states in the Americas. Newly founded governments quickly called on cartography to represent, differentiate, and manage the new polity; nationalistic education reforms lobbied for textbook maps bearing the logo-like outline image of the nation’s territory; teachers and parents instructed students and children to draw and memorize this logo map; poets and painters embellished it; and printers and entrepreneurs packaged and repackaged the nation’s map images to profit from the emergent passion for a national cartography.¹⁵

But these studies were also quick to point out that prominent postcolonial maps, such as John Melish’s Map of the United States with the Contiguous British and Spanish Possessions (1816; Figure 4) or Garcia Cubas’s Carta General de la República Mexicana (1858), were expected to work as national birth certificates only because they belonged—and were recognized as belonging—to an international mode of certification steeped in previously colonial American cartographic projects. Important to discussing any early American cartographic culture is the recognition that the national impulse that dominated nineteenth-century maps was by and large the historical continuation of a preexisting imperial cartography imported to the Americas since the late fifteenth century. Two statements from England are representative of national and imperial imperatives that informed map production and consumption in the early Americas. When in 1670 the English statesman Fulke Greville postulated that Powre must use lawes, as her best instrument; Lawes bring Mappes, he addressed English lawmakers arguing over the feasibility of the English nation-state. However, this instrumental understanding of cartography also extended to imperial mapping projects. In the same year, the English crown demanded that its colonial agents procure exact Mapps, Platts or Charts of all and Every [of] our said Plantations abroad, togeather with the Mapps and Descriptions of their respective Ports, Harbours, Forts, Bayes, Rivers with the Depth of their respective Channells, which [they] are carefully to Register and Keepe. These instructions not only borrowed a formula that aligned maps with governance and sovereignty but exported cartography as the mechanism for managing landed possessions and political abstraction to territorial outliers such as plantations and colonies.¹⁶

As numerous studies examining imperial or colonial cultures in the Americas have shown, cartographic projects launched during the age of imperialism—be they European or Anglo-, Ibero-, Franco-, or Dutch-American—followed this power / law / map nexus to the letter. The geometric figures of cartography were present in royal edicts and macropolitics (for example, the Treaties of Tordesillas [1494] or Paris [1763], which parceled out large chunks of America among European powers) as much as they were present in local customs and microgovernments (cartography informed communal affairs from New England Puritans to Caribbean planters, from village life in New Spain to tax codes in South American cities). Encoded with European symbols of political authority, early American maps revealed themselves to be not only a specialized writing technology highly amenable for representing the dictates of European notions of territoriality and land management. In the course of three centuries’ deployment in the service of the spatial discourse of empire, the cultural technology of cartography had become codependent, if not synonymous, with the constitution of American political culture.¹⁷

NEW CANONS, NEW HISTORIES

Ironically, the very ideological inflection of critical inquiries, which in more recent accounts has threatened to limit the understanding of cartography as a discursive juggernaut privileging nothing but power relations, was also responsible for a widespread critical effort that challenged the monothetic conceptions of early American cartography (and thus effectively moved beyond the two historiographic traditions). When cartographic studies, following the lead of J. B. Harley, took a literary turn during the late 1980s and early 1990s, questions of power and politics became possible precisely because maps were treated for the first time as thick texts operating by signs, symbols, and rhetoric. From the moment that the textuality rather than the accuracy of maps came under scrutiny, early modern maps showing America became a fertile ground for the study of imperial ideology and its colonial and postcolonial adaptations. Cartographic lines, symbols, and names were compared to genealogies of socially constructed knowledge. What were previously considered conventional inscriptions or ornamental drawings now signified not just graphic variations of geographic knowledge but also complex relationships involving power structures, concepts of ethnicity, and habits of sociability.¹⁸

Similar to the recovery projects spurred by the canon wars in early American literary studies that during the 1980s brought back into focus the overlooked writings by women, African, and native American authors, cartographic histories that had taken a literary turn spurred a similar revaluation of the early American map canon during the 1990s. On the one hand, if tracing semiotic changes in map content meant tracing power relations via map meaning, a new generation of studies influenced by the second school of historiography began comparing classic maps, that is, maps of high political importance, with an array of maps that historically had been of little political consequence but nevertheless had been popular, often homemade, and known for their great everyday appeal. As a consequence, traditional discussions of great maps, such as John Mitchell’s Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755), expanded to include little and middling maps ranging from atlas maps, generic textbook maps, and cut-out magazine maps.¹⁹ Or, to put it differently, the traditional archive of European and Euro-American maps delineating all or sections of America now included surveys that contained crude manuscript sketches next to sophisticated printed maps, politically delicate information next to rote school exercises, the randomness of land lotteries next to carefully strategized geopolitical maneuvers.²⁰

Responding to the expansion of the cartographic canon, critical approaches expanded many of the established parameters when discussing early American maps. Whereas modern and postmodern criticism extolled the virtues or vices (depending on ideological outlook) of early modern cartography’s spatial rationalization, studies that focus on the Americas increasingly have moved beyond lines of longitude and latitude, boundaries and claims of territorial sovereignty. The geometrization of the Western Hemisphere is no longer the exclusive focus; it is now supplemented (although not superseded) by a more tectonic outlook that explores the figuration of islands and regions or the role of oceans and continents in cartographic representations of the Americas. Correlating cartographic epistemology with historical map experiences, a new generation of critical studies takes into account that maps, like the physical geography they represent, reveal fragmentary glimpses rather than holistic and totalized overviews. Thematic maps, such as Benjamin Franklin’s map of the Gulf Stream or Alexander von Humboldt’s isomorphic maps of vegetation and climate are now at the center of discussions over the cartographic configuration of American spaces. A burgeoning interest in the extracartographic application of maps in areas of law, economics, and material culture, to name a few, have more or less complemented the revision of some of the oldest historiographic parameters. By the end of the 1990s, studies had changed the temporal framework, comparing and interpreting early American maps with those dating back to Ptolemy or the Middle Ages in Europe.²¹ At the same time, the Eurocentric approach to cartographic culture in America had lost its canonical grip with the recognition of non-European cartography. Time and story lines established by cartographic history now had to be reconciled with indigenous cultures of mapping and mapmaking that involved nongeometric designs, nonsequential notions of history, and nontextual modes of storytelling.²²

With the inclusion of non-European maps, textual approaches to American cartography increasingly incorporated nontextual modes of analysis. Allusions to the early modern definition that compared the map of the world to the theatrum orbis terrarum, for example, expanded the mode of historicizing cartography by addressing maps in terms of theatricality and performance culture. Treating maps as snapshots documenting a specific cultural view of geographic knowledge, scholars now identify early modern maps as staging grounds that function similarly to theatrical sceneries; like the stage master’s graphic plot, they project real spatial actions while also projecting imagined reactions to a geometrically determined space. When applied to early American cartography, this performative understanding resituates maps as multidimensional spectacles. Not only disparate textual elements, such as image and word, were joined, but nontextual practices ranging from stage props and text-body interactions to indigenous friendship rituals and memory landscapes were often enmeshed beyond easy recognition—but not beyond recovery.²³

Insofar as pre–nineteenth-century maps generated in both Europe and the Americas contain traces of discursive and nondiscursive practices, the history of these maps can be understood as a story about a specific place that is structured not only by the historical actions of a few select subjects but also by an array of interactions involving actors and agencies, objects and happenstance. Early American maps are best understood as flexible spaces containing a host of mobile elements and their interactions occurring within. As a form of composition, early American maps become spatial stories representing the various elements and their movements. On the side of map production, these spatial stories emerged from the map’s conceptual and discursive flexibility to contain mappings from different cultural origins. On the side of map reception, the spatial story of individual maps reflects a cartographic history that is not determined by evolutionary or stadial accounts of particular maps and genres. Instead, it accounts for the map as a time- and space-sensitive palimpsest reflecting multiple patterns of short- and long-durational consequence. By the same token that a map is a totalizing tableau documenting the state of geographic knowledge, the essays in this collection examine the conditions that shape the state of cartographic knowledge, knowledge that in its diverse origins at once borrowed from its prehistory, laid claim to the present, and projected into the future. While investigating the stories of linear development, map-induced hegemony, and European domination, the essays fan out in new directions to study the American cartographic pluralism reflected by the diversity of cartographic cultures and practices.²⁴

AN EXAMPLE OF CARTOGRAPHIC PLURALITY

A brief example, involving the mappings of the Nechecole people, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and an ideologically overdetermined national map, illustrates the cultural density and cartographic layers that make up early American maps. On a spring day in 1806, after having successfully reached the Pacific Ocean and looking to sketch out alternative routes for the return trip, William Clark asked members of the Nechecole tribe about the geography of the western Rocky Mountains. In response, one of the tribe’s elders took his finger and drew a map into the dust; Clark took a pencil and copied the map into his notebook. After two years of travel, cartographic interviews like this had become a routine experience for members of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Tribal elders on both sides of the continental divide—be they Mandan and Hidatsa or Nez-Pierce and Shoshone—demonstrated the ability to think in cartographic terms. They not only used various modes of projection and scales of abstraction, but they also represented the land like a map.²⁵

For the duration of the interviews, the map established a unique sense of sameness between local native people and the mixed company of passing strangers. After the interviews were over, however, the application of maps revealed a difference in cartographic sensibility separating Amerindian from Euro-American. As Lewis and Clark discovered, just as the Nechecole elder could produce maps at will, he had no interest in or need for preserving them. For Clark, the record keeper, the sketch map yielded vital information about 4 nations, 40 miles of waterways, and 11 Towns. For the elder, who drew the map from memory, the map was part of a performance used during oral rituals intended to recount the Nechecole’s sense of geography in relational rather than spatial terms. For the Nechecole elder—and even more so for the delegation of elders who, according to Clark’s account, had arrived at a great age, and appeared to be helthy tho’ blind—the memory and the story of their immediate geography was more important than the actual map and visual representation of the place. In most ritual encounters, map sketches ended with their ceremonial erasure. By contrast, for the expedition leaders, who were quickly passing through the area, paper copies of indigenous maps were treasured objects; documenting the journey’s progress in durable form, they were considered hard evidence and material knowledge integral not only for the immediate purpose of orientation but also for the expedition’s overall success.²⁶

By the spring of 1806, the preparation of a master map illustrating the journey’s geographical findings had become the expedition’s primary objective. The map was intended for shipment to the capital of the United States, where it would serve two important functions: it would answer a question from the past and raise another for the future. A Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track, across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean (1814; Figure 3), originally drawn by William Clark and published as the expedition’s official map, permanently put to rest the historical question about the existence of a transcontinental waterway. Where older maps had left blank most of the space west of the Rocky Mountains, Clark’s map now erected multiple mountain ranges; it filled in valleys of imaginary waterways; and it populated with tribal names vast areas that were previously presumed to have been unpopulated.²⁷

A landmark of early American cartography, the map was quickly adopted by contemporary mapmakers for more than the obvious reason that it provided new information.²⁸ For many cartographers, it provided optical fodder fueling propagandistic questions about the new nation’s territorial reach. National maps, such as the Map of the United States (1816; Figure 4) by John Melish, included Clark’s representation of western topography in great detail. But they also omitted many local references to tribes in order to make a better argument for a U. S.-controlled American empire. Or, as Melish wrote: To present a picture of [the western territory] was desirable in every point of view. The map so constructed, shows at a glance the whole extent of the United States territory from sea to sea; and, in tracing the probable expansion of the human race from east to west, the mind finds an agreeable resting place on its western limits. The view is complete, and leaves nothing to be wished for. It also adds to the beauty and symmetry of the map; which will, it is confidently believed, be found one of the most useful and ornamental works ever executed in this country.²⁹

Maps like the ones by Clark and Melish strictly adhered to the principles of abstraction and geometric symmetry; they emphasized concepts of location over local experience, aesthetic objects over human subjects. Like their European counterparts, American mapmakers used their maps to signal the cultural status of cartographic representation as being definitive and, above

FIGURE 3. [William Clark and] Samuel Lewis, A Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track, across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean; by Order of the Executive of the United States in 1804, 5, and 6 . . . (London, 1814). Courtesy, The Library Company of Philadelphia

FIGURE 4. John Melish, Map of the United States with the Contiguous British and Spanish Possessions (Philadelphia, 1816). Courtesy of the Library of Congress

all, scientific. They presented maps as empirical systems whose primary goal was to establish order at a glance, while disowning the map’s unempirical history of production, the prolonged human efforts, and the idiosyncrasies of local mapping encounters. In this understanding of early American cartography, maps conformed to the standards of geometric representation, and mathematical calculation had neither space nor signs available for showing a more experiential or local reckoning of cartography. Local maps—the foundation of early American cartography—not to mention the authors, events, and stories surrounding them—were for the most part lost inside the elegant but impersonal symmetry of the final map.

But beneath the symmetry of the printed maps and its representation of a modern homogenous spatiality were always hovering the manifold traces of locally specific cartographic activities. These activities took place simultaneously on two sides of the globe: they included the Nechecole mapping practice in which tribal history, ceremonial ritual, and spatial knowledge of the Pacific Northwest converged; and they included the expedition’s base map, which had been composed using a mixed archive consisting of French, Spanish, German, and English maps.³⁰ Bearing the traces of the Nechecole sand map, the Clark and then the Melish map were, like so many of the maps showing the Americas in the metropolitan centers of America and Europe, the product of a continuum of cultural collaboration. This continuum of collaboration involved, on one side, multilingual translations, indigenous ceremonies, and ephemeral maps such as sand drawings. On the other side, it involved printed maps that, although claimed to be definitive representations of national or imperial domains, were themselves tentative, subject to collaborative practices spurred by the competitive network of map sponsors and publishers.³¹ Mapmakers and map users on either side of this spectrum would have had great difficulty agreeing on the same definition of a map. Are maps two-dimensional paper constructs or three-dimensional objects representing just space or both space and time? Are they required to operate by graphic design and visual cognition, or can they be multisensory vehicles of communication, tapping, for example, tactile and auditory expressions of individual or collective memories? Although easily recognized as maps, are they comparable between cultures that share neither the same linguistic nor cosmological outlook of space and spatial representation? The cartographic nexus of the Clark-Melish maps, while also bearing the traces of the Nechecole dirt map, suggests all of the above has to be taken into account when describing and analyzing the culture of early American cartographies.³²

THE CARTOGRAPHIC TURN IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

This account of the Nechecole-Clark-Melish maps, involving trajectories that fan out from a single cartographic event into multiple cartographic histories, describes some of the material, discursive, and critical issues that are at the heart of this collection of essays. While continuing to engage with questions posed by the ideological and literary analysis of maps, Early American Cartographies on the whole argues for a cartographic turn in the study of early American history and culture, a turn that has given rise to a number of influential works that rethink the Eurocentric, putatively scientific, and all-too-often metaphorical conception of cartography. As noted above, such studies have produced invaluable insights from a variety of perspectives: aside from increasing our awareness of the richness of the American cartographic archive and chronicling national cartographies, studies now address early American mappings through the lens of cultural geography, ethnography, and early American literature; the mapping impulse that was traced into art history and the historiography of empire now underwrites critical work on carto-literacy, definitions of liberty, and constitutional law.

The methodological diversity of these studies reflects the interdisciplinary recognition of the ways in which cartographic representations not only impinged upon questions of space and place in the Atlantic world but also increasingly touched on cartographic encounters in the Western Hemisphere. But many of these studies are bounded by space and time, cleaving to disciplinary demands on periodization and area-specific methodologies. By tapping the methodological diversity of their various disciplines, this collection of essays loosens these boundaries. Exploring early American cartographies as a practice of cultural mediation, it both reconciles and expands dominant notions of pre–nineteenth-century spatiality in the Americas through investigating ideas of alternative spatial imaginings, patterns of local production and global reception, not to mention the fundamentally uneven processes responsible for the selection of cartographic knowledge.

The following essays put pressure on opinions like the ones expressed by John Melish quoted above; they examine maps as both scientific and aesthetic objects (beauty and symmetry), as cultural icons representing political ambition (probable expansion), and as proto-industrial products (useful) performing individuated cultural work. In this historical materialist perspective, maps continue to emerge from a linear history in which maps beget maps. By the same token that this narrative is about a diachronic sense of cartography according to which new maps supersede the old, the collection offers a synchronic assessment of the way in which both monumental and ephemeral maps traveled beyond the circle of imperial ambition and nation building.

That said, by branching out from the confines of period definition and demarcated geographies, Early American Cartographies plumbs the ephemeral nature of cartographic exchange in the Americas. The essays explore dirty maps: the indigenous maps sketched into sand or painted on skins as well as the European sketch maps written with pen and pencil on paper scraps or into field books. They also examine the most ephemeral of cartographies, the residual maps that inhabit cultural memory, visual perception, and the literary imagination. In this ephemeral perspective, the collection engages with a deep historical archive that is shown to be situated at the intersection of multicultural memories and mnemonic practices, which involve local habits of learning and unlearning, including the process of internalizing cartographic knowledge over time before and after becoming externalized in particular map forms.

Throughout, Early American Cartographies traces the cartographic representation of American spaces in relation to the communication circuits and knowledge networks spanning not only the Atlantic but also the American world. By the same token that spatial information packaged in the format of the map moved unevenly between local tribes, colonial agents, and European courts, all the time crossing and recrossing cultural and political boundaries, the process of knowledge transfer in early American maps was as substantial as it was relational. The cartographic culture in early America was fundamentally dialogic in practice, ranging from face-to-face encounters to published correspondence to graphic transfers such as script-into-print adaptations. Situated inside a media landscape that predates most of the local powers of yet-to-be-formed American nation-states, cartographic production and consumption resulted less from a vertical, top-down one-way traffic system as it has been imagined by Foucaultian or Latourian analyses of cartographic history; rather, the spatial stories of early American maps occurred horizontally, in a two-way traffic pattern, in which concrete local practice and abstract global theory were not only mutually constitutive but also the fulcrum for a wide variety of ideas, uses, and valuations of space on the ground.³³

PART I. CARTOGRAPHIC HORIZONS AND IMPERIAL POLITICS

The essays in Part I provide a common ground for the overall project of Early American Cartographies by investigating current assumptions about early American cartography, territoriality, and imperial power. In their review of well-known European mapping ventures, using classic and lesser-known archives, these essays at once confirm and expand the strategic interpretation of cartography from both macro- and microhistorical perspectives. In section 1, Deep Archives; or, The Empire Has Too Many Maps, Ricardo Padrón reviews the history of imperial cartography at the crossroads of 1750, when the Treaty of Madrid realigned Spanish and Portuguese possessions in South America. By foregrounding the cartographic work of Vincente de Memije, an army captain stationed in the Philippines, Padrón offers a decentralized perspective on the mapping of Spain’s empire. Through the example of Memije’s map, Padrón illustrates the global reach of cartography and the discourse of power. He both makes a case for the expansion of the cartographic canon and critically reassesses cartographic ideologies, which, contrary to current critical expectations of conformity, instead struggle to keep up with imperial aspirations. Ken MacMillan offers a parallel review of imperial cartography but from the British perspective. By discussing intranational applications of cartographic theory in maps circulating in early modern England, his essay examines cartographic authority in relation to international territorial demands that were made along the conceptual fault line of imperium (absolute sovereignty) and dominium (territorial possession). A comparison of maps produced in the center of imperial England with maps originally made in the colonial periphery, in particular the maps of Captain John Smith, reasserts the cartographic history of central authority and territorial hegemony.

Section 2, The (Un)Making of Colonies, investigates maps made by colonial officials as representing America from the inside out in an Atlantic culture of cartographic exchange. Jess Edwards, using the First Lords Proprietors’ Map of Carolina, examines the liberal nature of seventeenth-century geography in relation to seventeenth-century dictates of colonization and economic reform. Having adopted elements of John Locke’s theories of property and individual rights, geography and by extension also early American cartography forged a rhetorical compromise between old and new, traditional and progressive social visions. Both geographers and cartographers articulated an accommodation between a liberal ethos of individual endeavor and a conservative one of stable, hierarchical community and aristocratic social stewardship. As Júnia Ferreira Furtado shows in her essay, late-eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian mappings of the gold country in the Minas Gerais captaincy expressed similar concerns about individual freedom and communal order. Surveys and maps by the colonial mapmaker José Joaquim da Rocha, while adhering to the protocols of modern mapping technologies, contained at once the discursive mechanics of imperial control and the rhetoric of political independence. Territorial maps initially designed to ascertain colonial resources were quickly construed as graphic icons capable of negotiating political dissent within the colony and launching a nationalistic separatist agenda pitting the colony against the Portuguese empire.

PART II. CARTOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

The essays collected in Part II examine the concept of invention, which has been at once a crucial term in the representation of American spaces and a key concept in the historiography of early American maps. To follow Edmundo O’Gorman’s influential study, the invention of America is a cartographic process that began with the first naming of America on a map and has continued ever since with the cartographic projection of America in map publications. For O’Gorman, the cartographic invention of America allowed him to question critical assumptions about how America registered in the European imagination. The following essays focus instead on the process of mapping and mapmaking in inventing America as a space or place from within American cultures. Looking at indigenous and European mapping projects, the essays are case studies that explore cartographic invention unfolding simultaneously and locally on the ground while also becoming folded into global patterns of cartographic transmission. Throughout Part II, the essays begin to reinvent the study of cartographic production and consumption as a multi-tiered and interconnected field where maps are at once culturally distinct but inherently comparable, familiar and yet strange, mass-produced but also uniquely crafted, in short, a field in which map design, meaning, and function are driven by the plurality of maps.

Section 3, Native Maps / Mapping Natives, examines three instances of indigenous encounters with maps, ranging from cartographic collaboration to tribal performance to the imbrication of local indigenous culture with global cartographic events. By investigating The Discoveries of John Lederer (1672), Gavin Hollis examines a particular cartographic encounter between Europeans and native Americans. Viewed through the lens of ethnocartographic history, this encounter is a locus classicus for documenting maps and mapping practices as a much overlooked medium for facilitating moments of cultural contact while also affecting subsequent historical narratives and interpretations. Looking to the semiotic and textual nature of indigenous maps, in particular a Skidi Star Chart whose origins date back to the sixteenth century, William Gustav Gartner recovers a rare moment of North American indigenous astronomical mapping in which a spatial inventory of the heavens also graphically facilitates a spatial understanding of Skidi worlds on the ground. Showing the Skidi Star Chart to employ ancient cartographic conventions, this essay explores the conceptual ambiguities and interpretive challenges that arise from the application of modern Western notions of spatial relationships and geographic understanding. That Western notions of cartography infiltrated indigenous cultures is central to the essay by Andrew Newman. His investigation of the manipulation of indigenous rituals of cartographic collaboration during the Walking Purchase of 1737 discovers a global pattern of land transaction and colonization. Land acquisitions based on the hide trick were steeped in a folkloric cartographic discourse dating back to classical mythology. But appropriating territory the size of an ox hide and then laying cut-up strips end to end to maximize the area proved to be a tactical strategy encircling the globe: beginning as a story of Euro-American contact, the story of the hide trick is attributed to the Spaniards in the Philippines, the Portuguese in Cambodia, Malaysia, and Burma, and the Dutch in Java, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Africa, and New York.

Section 4, Cosmopolitan Maps, examines the relationship of cartographic representation and transatlantic urbanism. Beginning with an example from New England, Matthew H. Edney discusses the rhetorical finesse of public engagement underlying the simultaneous publication of land grant maps in both Boston and London during the mid-eighteenth century. Three maps showing the Kennebec River in the Eastern District of the colony of Massachusetts Bay illustrate the complex relationship between maps and print culture in a public sphere defined by publicity, sociability, and literacy. In this culture, maps and mapping practices exemplified the notion of a printed discourse resting on a rhetoric of disinterest, truthfulness, and rationality. Yet the maps of the Kennebec show the cultural significance of printing to be more variable, as the maps and cartographic writing were deployed strategically as tokens of interest and passion in the eighteenth century’s critical public discourse. The interest of mapmakers and their sponsors inform Judith Ridner’s example of imperial cartography playing itself out in midcentury urban-planning activities. When the land speculator, Thomas Penn, founded Carlisle in Pennsylvania, cartographic conventions that had previously informed visionary settlements from Massachusetts to Florida provided a stagelike town plan in which mapping activities fuse the principles of sociability and civility to capitalist commerce. A different impulse of strategic thinking is the focus of Scott Lehman’s discussion of harbor plans showing the city of Havana in the Gentleman’s Magazine between the 1740s and 1760s. Investigating the symbiotic relationship between maps and news against the background of an emergent journalistic cartography, this essay illustrates that even the most rudimentary maps were instruments of political propaganda in an Atlantic world defined by cartography and mass print culture.

PART III. META-CARTOGRAPHIES: ICONS, OBJECTS, AND METAPHORS

The final part of the collection opens the circle of cartographic exchange the widest by exploring the relationship between cartographic artifact and cartographic thinking from a contextual perspective that includes the museum and interior architecture, material and visual culture, and map-based representations linking ecological disaster to slave resistance in literatures far removed from the cartographic experience. Examining international exhibitions, such as the Columbus centennial of 1892 in Madrid, Barbara E. Mundy finds the historical reach of multilayered maps that are at the heart of the spatial story of early American cartographies. Put on display halfway around the globe, the Mexican Atlas geográfico (1858) not only contained an assortment of geographical maps eagerly asserting the national independence of the state of Mexico but also included select indigenous maps to support the authority of the new national cartography. Although these indigenous maps were used to affirm the historical depth of the nation space, and by association the legitimacy of the nation itself, they were also highly ambivalent signifiers. Though appropriated for all the reasons that have exposed cartographic products to be minions of ideology and power, the reproduction of indigenous maps destabilized the modern order of knowledge, in particular the logic of a national cartography.

Exploring a different range of maps and exhibits, Martin Brückner discusses public and private map displays in relation to British American material culture during the second half of the eighteenth century. By reviving the ornamental understanding of maps, the essay approaches cartographic maps, that is, conventional geometric maps, as consumer goods whose meaning is contingent on the materiality surrounding their presentation. With maps being embedded—real and symbolically—inside physical places (architecture), the decorative arts (pictures), and the material culture of everyday life (furniture), maps were at the core of a performative culture that carto-coded the map consumers’ sensory and bodily experience of the mapped spaces they inhabited. Testing the systemic thinking that underlies the discussion of mappings and cartographies, Michael Drexler proposes a counter-factual experiment. Barely referencing the image, object, or history of early American cartographies, his essay posits the cartographically imagined space of the Caribbean as the site in which hurricanes and slave revolts track each other in quasi-cartographic patterns. By substituting the language of maps for that of storms and catastrophe, the analysis of texts ranging from Benjamin Franklin’s map of the Gulf Stream (1769), Philip Freneau’s poem The Hurricane (1785), Frederick Douglass’s only work of fiction The Heroic Slave (1853), and Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1856), the essay calls attention to the vocabulary responsible for the arbitrary construction of national and political borders. By the same token that the vocabulary of storms was able to assert, like maps, the geographical centrality of the Caribbean or the Atlantic world as a concrete space, this language could never be precise or efficient enough to be exhausted by one particular mode of signification. The implied language of maps, using word and image for tracking storms and revolts, in the end cannot maintain a spatial representation promising local solidarity and a sense of community in the Americas.

In what follows, then, Early American Cartographies investigates the enduring significance of the cartographic representation of space and place in scholarship specifically focused on the early Americas. In the course of its fourteen essays, the volume provides overviews and introductions to traditional subject areas involving early American cartography. On the whole, the essays show a breadth of coverage not only in terms of period materials (classic and lesser-known maps) and critical issues (empire building, colonization, nationalism) but also offer comparative approaches to American maps reflecting Anglo- and Ibero-American mapping ventures. The majority of essays address cartographic projects and mapping habits as they took place on the ground. Demonstrating the local and global nature of cartographic exchange in the Americas, they present original work (and many unpublished primary materials) on local mapping ventures involving not only Euro-American but indigenous mapmakers whose works were shaped as much by colonial and imperial agendas as by extrapolitical attitudes toward maps and mappings.

As a result of the collection’s emphasis on cartographic pluralism, the essays throughout redefine and categorize early American maps and mapping projects as a composite aspect of early American cultural production. By grafting the literary motif of composition to the methodologies of standard cartographic inquiry, the essays describe maps as a thickly textured medium representing Western and non-Western short-term fantasies about the Americas as well as those conceived over long periods of time; cartographic users and their relationship to imperial conflicts and colonialism in the Americas; the portrayal of rural and urban spaces in print and manuscript from North to South America; the conception of geographic space by grid and nongeodetic mappings; map trade and map consumption in the Americas; maps used in land speculation and promotional schemes; the rhetorical and psychological application of maps; and the use of maps in the arts and everyday life.

By emphasizing that pre–nineteenth-century cartography was a highly multiform and multicultural affair, the essays throughout Early American Cartographies pursue a comparative approach: they pair macro-with micro-histories; they juxtapose cartographic materials of